New Paper in Cog­ni­tion by Lavan, Kre­it­e­wolf et al.

Con­grat­u­la­tions to for­mer Obleser post­doc Jens Kre­it­e­wolf (now at McGill Uni­ver­si­ty) for his new paper in Cog­ni­tion, “Famil­iar­i­ty and task con­text shape the use of acoustic infor­ma­tion in voice iden­ti­ty perception”! 

Togeth­er with our col­leagues from Lon­don, Nadine Lavan and Car­olyn McGet­ti­gan, we took a new approach to test the long­stand­ing the­o­ret­i­cal claim that lis­ten­ers dif­fer in their use of acoustic infor­ma­tion when per­ceiv­ing iden­ti­ty from famil­iar and unfa­mil­iar voic­es. Unlike pre­vi­ous stud­ies that have relat­ed sin­gle acoustic fea­tures to voice iden­ti­ty per­cep­tion, we linked lis­ten­ers’ voice-iden­ti­ty judg­ments to more com­plex acoustic representations—that is, the spec­tral sim­i­lar­i­ty of voice  record­ings (see Fig­ure below).

This new study has a direct link to pop cul­ture (by cap­ti­laz­ing on nat­u­ral­ly-vary­ing voice record­ings tak­en from the famous TV show Break­ing Bad) and chal­lenges tra­di­tion­al pro­pos­als that view famil­iar and unfa­mil­iar voice per­cep­tion as being dis­tinct at all times.

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